By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — Tackling poverty among children in Arkansas is the way to address the state’s high rankings in childhood obesity and hunger, the head of a child advocacy group said today.
“Until we really make progress in fighting childhood poverty there is only so much we’re going to be able to do about child hunger and child obesity,” Rich Huddleston, executive director of Arkansas Advocates for children and Families, told the Arkansas News Bureau.
Huddleston spoke after participating in a panel discussion at the Clinton School of Public Service on the two issues that affect about one-fourth of children in the state.
Recent reports, including one by Feeding America, show that the hunger rate among Arkansas children is 25 percent, and the obesity rate is 20 percent.
“It’s a huge problem and this problem has only gotten worse with the recent economic recession,” Huddleston said. “In the long term, we really need to address the problem with poverty, it’s a much tougher problem to address but that’s where we need to focus our public policy.”
Margaret Bogle, director of the Delta Nutrition Intervention Research Institute in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said in many of the Delta counties of East Arkansas, 50 percent of the school-age children are obese. Many of those children also live in poverty, she said.
Dan Christenson, senior staff member for the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, told a crowd of more than 50 about the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which has been endorsed by both the House and Senate agriculture committees.
The program would commit an additional $4.5 billion to child-nutrition programs over the next 10 years and implement sweeping changes to those programs.
Among other things, the legislation directs the USDA to set new nutrition standards for all food served in school lunchrooms.
Bogle said after the panel discussion that a study should be done on obese children to determine whether they are getting the necessary daily nutrition requirements.
“Nobody has done a real good study on what the nutritional status of our overweight kids, versus those who are not,” she said.
Others participating in the panel discussion were Dr. Pat Casey, professor of developmental pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital, and Rhonda Sanders, executive director of the Arkansas Alliance for Hunger Relief.
